Triumph In Blog

Can we separate sound from its context?

In the development of my style so far, I’ve found that a lot of the tools that I’m drawn to in production (the ones that aren’t born from necessity, that is,) are sounds all of a certain kind. I gravitate towards square waves, and monophonic synths, and arpeggiators. I’ve been enjoying my attempts to make things spacious, using all kinds of neat tools to develop my own workflow of reverbs and chords to make my songs sound “full,” but there’s something about raw simplicity that appeals to me. Just 3 or 4 tracks, 1 voice each, creating simple harmonies and repetitive structures.

In essence, once I master and release these things, they invariably sound like “chiptune.” In fact, I’ve not shied away from calling my own work by that name in the past. But what exactly does it mean, outside of genre pedantry? I’ve said before that “genre” isn’t really all that useful for describing anything, and that’s because it’s all perception. It means nothing in terms of the approach or the method in which the thing itself is made. Genres are arbitrary rules that people prescribe to themselves as comparators for new information, which is a worthless and reductive way to think once you’ve gotten involved with a specific kind of music enough. Why bother having breed standards for music? Who cares if something isn’t “metal” or “hip hop” in the way you’d expect, when you can just fucking listen to it?

Expectations from the outside mean nothing. Anyone can and will associate a piece of artwork with an abstract feeling, even if it’s specifically built to avoid that. I do not make any of my music with the intent of “making chiptune,” for example, and I have no interest in simply aping existing things. So when I say “chiptune,” truth be told it is mostly marketing: people do like to know vaguely what to expect. And the term “chiptune” implies, sans context, square waves, crunchy drums, bleeps and bloops. “Chip” referring to “sound chip,” the piece of an old computer or game console that can read and write sound or MIDI information.

These are things that sound like video games to us. The intent behind the naming of the genre was to spawn a sort of community and shared history around music that sounds like it was made for an old video game. Nostalgia: is this concept not itself another illusion? All genre is developed by looking back and trying to find a line of best fit between things that sound similar, so we can design expectations for future entries that appear to be the same (intentionally or otherwise.) “Chiptune” is the result of the analysis of songwriting practices, production styles, and technological limitations of a small time in history for computer generated music, but does that analysis really just end at video games?

It’s true that the most familiar applications of the primitive sound chip synthesizers of the 80s and 90s were in video game consoles, but that was hardly what they were designed specifically to do. There is a plethora of music from all across the board with the exact same approach to sound generation as any of the most beloved and remembered video game console equivalents. Music that uses square wave synths, music that’s entirely electronic, music made using tracker software, music generated using mathematics. It’s there before, during, and after all the glory days of Earthbound and Unreal Tournament. Wendy Carlos, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Jean-Michel Jarre, hell, Kraftwerk: the sounds we generate from computers are not limited to video games at all.

I believe it’s important to take these concepts in without limiting ourselves to only their one application. These specific chips with their own bespoke sounds are unique to their individual video game consoles yes, and we remember enjoying the accompanying games, yes, but they were not all created with the purpose in mind of being under one big tent. Thinking of these sounds as “video game music” is just limiting for no reason. How many times have you listened to music from a game you’ve never heard of or played? Via social media, how often are you exposed to music from video games without even knowing it? Does that affect your perception of it?

I do not believe in the pursuit of “chiptune,” although the music I study and try to create often includes many components that are superficially “chiptune” signifiers. I do not dislike video game music or video games, and I don’t think it’s wrong to cultivate a sound intended to invoke a specific memory, time, place, or even existing work. Studying video game music and the people who made it, in all times and eras, has been a great joy for me. But I believe that it is possible to remove things from their context, both literally and metacognitively. We think of wavetables and pulses and algorithms as things meant for computer games, but the sounds exist independent of their myriad applications. I believe that we can cultivate sounds as being abstract things, meant to evoke certain feelings and moods, rather than working backwards from where we believe the sounds will be played, heard, or interpreted.

As Hitchcock had his Pure Cinema, I want to pursue Pure Music. I believe that the generation and manipulation of the sound format itself should be sufficient for approaching the desired effect without the need for descriptors, genres, existing precedents, or even lyrics. Electronic music allows us to have an immense, deific control over every inch of a sound’s creation, and keeping certain aspects simple allows us to focus on others.

To return the cinema analogy; as Bazin described, there are certain techniques that are more valuable than others for achieving certain ends (his “objective reality” via mise-en-scene,) and music is no different. For me, though I love the timbre of a square or sawtooth wave, I like to keep the level of voices low and try to build long, droning chord sequences out of multiple different tracks. The minute interactions between the small amount of waveforms is what I aim to “pick out” from the mix, consciously or otherwise. Laurie Spiegel was a pioneer of this technique, generating “pure music” with algorithmic generation; simple, monophonic sequences slowly pan between channels and run into each other repetitively, at a certain ratio. It is no surprise that I approached MUSIC OF THE SPHERES in the same manner she did for her Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds, in that I used an approximate ratio of the orbital periods of celestial bodies as frequencies in Hz to build a droning chord. It appears to move, although it does not, and is only ever interrupted by other, rhythmic pulses, meant to represent irregular orbits or interloping bodies.

Although “chiptune” music uses the same kinds of waveforms to create sounds, it is in no way interested in the actual cultivation of or implications from the generation thereof. The sounds are handed down from A203 chips, internet ROM files, and Gradius III, and the emphasis is more on songwriting. How can we use these sounds to approximate analog music? Synthetic basslines and sampled, bitcrushed drums drive a “beat” over which a lead noodles around with an accompanying chord section. This is not wrong in any way, but it is myopic. We become mired in pastiche, seeking only to use tools that can produce exact effects based on what we already know. Again, Bazin: why did he dislike montage? It was his belief that an audience ought to interpret a scene, not to have specific instants given to them in a rigid order. Propaganda! In music, there is a similarity; waves of sound have their own behaviors and interactions worth considering, but when we become obsessed with specific modes of songwriting, we limit them into prescriptions. Jazz musicians work to muffle their overtones, walls are built specifically to keep waves from reverberating, singers teach themselves to apply intense vibrato rather than allow notes to ring.

What I see as a high ideal to chase after is the ability to focus on these minute details of the sounds themselves, and set aside preconceptions. It is only briefly useful to classify music, or compare it to other things. It is a versatile medium, and it pairs nicely with other stuff for sure, but there is a Pure Music out there that is worth striving for. Why is that we hear violins and think of orchestras? Could a violin not be used anywhere, and for anything? Intentionally removing context is necessary for finding new applications of sound, and those new applications are how we find ways to create music more specifically. No one timbre or waveform of sound is limited to any one sphere or influence.

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Real talk: does any of that make sense? I’m not hating on chiptune, I’ve listened to a lot of that stuff. And I like video games. But TL;DR we don’t have to make music in service of genres or use things only where they’re expected, right? We can use any kind of sound in any situation, and ignore context to create new things. Can’t we? I’ve certainly made a lot of songs that are made with specific, existing approaches in mind, and even when I like the end result, I feel unfulfilled. I believe the future of music (of mine, anyway,) is to continue using familiar tools and samples in new, unconventional ways and places to force people to confront the sound literally. It’s like Brecht! Or a bit like Jersey Club, I guess, but again: genre pedantry. I’ve got some drone music coming down the pipes that you should all be ready for